PRAVASISAMWAND.COM
The International Labor Organization’s (ILO) new report suggests the impact of the COVID-19 on the women workforce is more than their men counterparts. According to the Global Wage Report 2020/21, “Estimates based on a sample of 28 European countries find that, without wage subsidies, women would have lost 8.1 percent of their wages in the second quarter of 2020, compared to 5.4 percent for men.”
Among overall workers, severely affected are those who come under the bracket of ‘lower-paid workers’. “Those in lower-skilled occupations lost more working hours than higher-paying managerial and professional jobs. Using data from the group of 28 European countries the report shows that, without temporary subsidies, the lowest-paid 50 percent of workers would have lost an estimated 17.3 percent of their wages” the new report of the International Labour Organization (ILO) said.
The report talks about the minimum wages, which surprisingly suggests that 266 million people were earning less than the hourly minimum wage even before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. It means that 15 per cent of all wage earners worldwide, were affected “either because of non-compliance or because they were legally excluded from such schemes. Women are over-represented among workers earning the minimum wage or less.”
The Global Wage Report 2020/21 also looks at wage trends in 136 countries in the four years preceding the pandemic. It found that global real wage growth fluctuated between 1.6 and 2.2 percent. Real wages increased most rapidly in Asia and the Pacific and Eastern Europe and much more slowly in North America and northern, southern and western Europe.